The Other Is a Significant Other

“Du bist der Dinge tiefer Inbegriff der seines letztes Wort verschweigt und sich den Andern immer anders zeigt: dem Schiff als Küste und dem Land als Schiff.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch, Kapitel 3, Das Buch von der Pilgerschaft) ¹

When we deal with the question of religious plurality as a challenge to any faith community, we are bound to end up in a reflection on who we are, not in ourselves, as if this were ever a possibility, but in the light of the other. In such considerations, we need to begin asking questions of who the other is. Who am I, and who is the other? The same needs to take place when struggling to come to terms with the problem of the involvement of religion with violence. Who is the other when religion endorses violence? Is the other being “othered” when religion puts violence into its words?

The other is enigmatic and a challenge. As an introduction to the following contributions, let me, inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, share some thoughts on the other as a significant other.

Although Jewish, Levinas did not want to characterize himself as a Jewish thinker, and there are those who say that he was inspired too much by Christianity. The writer Daniel Sibony published Don de soi ou partage de soi? Le drame Levinas (Giving of the Self or Division of the Self? The Drama of Levinas), ² in which he argued that Levinas was actually expressing a Christian perspective that he put into the mouth of Judaism. Levinas’s Jewish identity was not authentic Judaism but, rather, what the Christian environment would like to identify as Judaism. Sibony maintained that Levinas actually remained a clandestine disciple of Heidegger.

When Levinas died in 1995, Le Monde called him “the most secular of religious men and the most religious of secular men.” His most important contribution was thinking on the issue of the individual’s infinite responsibility for the other. The philosophy of Levinas is based upon the significance of the other, the other both as God and the one whose face I meet. The other as an irreducible dynamic complicates monologous assertions and opens up other dimensions in my perception and understanding: tentative, less assertive, intuitive. There is and needs to be much space for intuition whenever we relate to the other or God. It is no wonder that the title of one of Levinas’s works is Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Intuition matters because it says that we are using all our senses in the pursuit of the other and in our quest for God. Intuition is the sixth sense. Anyone who trusts intuition knows also that you can taste the divine, as the Psalm has it, “O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps. 34:8). Anyone who trusts intuition knows that you should listen to the other and that you should pay attention to hearing the divine. The Jewish equivalent to the Creed has “Shema Israel, Adonai elohenu, Adonai echad, Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone” (Dt. 6:4). It seems to me that such an attitude in relation to one’s creed is different from when the creed is proclaimed from the top down. It is a question of attitude, which is convinced that big, predetermined doctrines and theories must not be projected onto reality but the opposite: Experience should be described by observing reality without recourse to theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines. This is perhaps a sign of our time, which more than anything else is characterized by an uneasiness toward being locked into categories.

The World Council of Churches (W.C.C.), in its attempts to get a handle on understanding religious plurality, brought together Christian theologians in a consultation in Baar, Switzerland, in 1990. Here, maybe for the first time in the context of W.C.C. reflections, the religious manifold is interpreted less in dogmatic...